There were twenty-five people in the schoolhouse and their writings nearly covered my plaster cast, but I was careful to reserve one corner, where I put a dotted line. The expression “dotted line” isn’t quite accurate, because usually the line is dashed, not dotted. But it was for you, Gentle Reader:
Chapter two
When this story really got started, I hadn’t yet met you. One Saturday afternoon the summer before, Mare Coe (who’d never yet actually done anything about his declared intention to become mayor) came into my newspaper office at Latha’s store and, pointing at my hectograph, inquired, “Can you print up posters and such on that thing?” I explained to Mare that the gelatin board could print up to about fifty copies before it began to become illegible. “Shoot, that’s more than enough, I reckon,” he said, and he took from his pocket a folded sheet of paper that he showed me. I read it with great interest, because politics ought to be a newspaper editor’s first priority, even more than war news, but there’d never been any political news in the history of Stay More. “What sort of figure would ye charge me for printin it up?” he asked. We agreed on a penny a sheet. He counted his pocket change and decided he could afford to have twenty copies printed but wondered if that might not be too many, “just to tack up hither and yon.” We discussed the various places that the poster ought to be tacked up: both ends of Latha’s store porch, the three big trees at Dill’s Gas and Service, near the door of the old Ingledew General Store, the front of the schoolhouse, on the one remaining show window of the abandoned bank building, both sides of the lone pine tree that dominated the intersection of the main road and the road up Banty Creek, various other trees in “downtown” Stay More (there were of course no poles yet for telephone or electricity anywhere in the town), and even on the giant sycamore tree that served as the pedestal for the Allies’ clubhouse.
Mare and I calculated that twenty copies ought to be enough; he gave me a quarter and I gave him a nickel in change. I asked Mare if he’d be amenable to a few corrections in his grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. “Do it everhow you like,” he consented. I didn’t charge him anything for helping him tack up the posters:
COME ONE COME ALL!
Let’s Us Start Us A Goverment!
Seeing as how just about all the menfolk has had to leave town to serve our country against Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo, and Stay More is just awasting away on the vine, don’t you think we ought to get
organized
and see if we can’t do nothing about it! Let’s have a election, and put together a “slate” of town officials like mayor and aldermen and town marshal and all!
But first, let’s have a meeting to discuss what we need to do to have this election and get it all going!
NEXT SATTERDAY NIGHT, AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE! EVERBODY BE THERE! RIGHT AFTER SUPPER!
PER: GERALD A. COE (Candidate for Mayor and I sure would appresiate your support and I pledge to do my utmost to serve you and this here town!)
Well, we tacked those up everywhere, and we knocked on Estalee Jerram’s door, right across the road from the schoolhouse, to ask if we could put one up on the schoolhouse door and also to get permission to use the schoolhouse for the meeting. Miss Jerram was delighted to see her former star pupil, and the way she greeted him like a long-lost star pupil convinced me that, contrary to rumor, they hadn’t actually been seeing each other since he graduated. “You didn’t spell Saturday correct,” she pointed out to him. “Also I think you’ve spelled appreciate wrong too.”
“Dawny here printed that,” he said, as if it was my fault we’d misspelled a couple of words. Miss Jerram looked at me as if she were calculating whether to hold me back one grade or two. “You’ll come to the meetin too, I hope?” he asked her.
“Well, goodness gracious, Gerald, don’t ye know? That’s our knittin night!” Miss Jerram was the leader of the Axis girls who met every Saturday night at her house to have a knitting bee, fashioning the sweaters and mittens and socks that were going to Our Boys Overseas.
Mare clapped his brow, and then I clapped mine, not in imitation of him but because I’d thought of something else too: “It’s also the night Doc Swain is taking some of us to the movies!”
Somehow Fridays didn’t seem as important as Saturdays, and Mare didn’t like the idea, but he borrowed a black Crayola from Miss Jerram and we went around to all the posters we’d already tacked up, scratching out “Satterday” and writing in Friday.
That week’s issue of The Stay Morning Star, which I delivered to all those RFD and post office boxes, carried a front-page article about the big political event under the headline STAY MORE TO FORM CITY GOVERNMENT, and on an inside page I ran a sort of profile of Gerald A. “Mare” Coe, 18, son of the town’s blacksmith, Lawlor Coe, and triplet brother to Burl, recently sent to Army boot camp in Texas, and Earl, who like Gerald was classified I-A and expected to be drafted any day now. I even included an editorial, “Everybody who is a citizen or who wants to be a good citizen ought to come to this meeting. Besides, it will take our minds off the war.” And I couldn’t resist including these words, “Here is a good chance for the rival crowds that are called Allies and Axis to bury the hatchet and smoke the peace pipe.”
On Friday night after supper I met Mare at the schoolhouse and we waited to see who-all would come. We wondered if any of the Allies actually would show up—when Burl Coe was drafted into the Army his place as leader of that faction had been taken by Sog Alan, the meanest and surliest of all the Allies, who’d have been happy to shoot all of us Axis if he hadn’t donated his gun to the scrap drive. The third of the triplets, Earl, although he was one of us Axis (and the hard-hitting catcher of Mare’s pitches in our ball games), probably would not come, Mare explained. “I just caint persuade him that government is anything to get excited about,” Mare said.
Lots of people felt that way, apparently. We had a poor turnout: of Stay More’s grown-ups, the only one who came to the meeting was Miss Jerram. This set me to brooding about whether or not people actually did take the trouble to read The Stay Morning Star. Since all of those who did show up at the schoolhouse, except Mare himself, had been a pupil the previous term, the whole lot of us simply looked like another session of school, or, since we weren’t all there, like a session of school when many are out with measles, colds, or the flu.
Eventually some of the Dinsmore kids showed up (including Ella Jean!) led by seventh-grader Willard Dinsmore, who was Mare’s lieutenant, more or less, as leader of the Axis. “Aint there nothin to eat?” Willard politely inquired, disappointed. Did I say earlier that none of us in Stay More were starving? I’ll take that back. Willard, though he got just as much to eat as his brothers and sisters, all twelve of them, in the shack they lived in away back up on Dinsmore Mountain, which is to say, enough victuals to sustain them without making any of them fat, was always hungry. Food was on his mind all the time. This struck me as phenomenal because I myself never gave food a thought. Willard wasn’t a conspicuous sort of person, despite looking like a scarecrow, and that wasn’t like him to speak up, even mildly and politely. Maybe he wasn’t naturally the quiet type, but with six brothers and six sisters he probably never had a chance to get a word in edgewise. And in school, Miss Jerram wouldn’t let him talk. There was a rumor that one time back in the fourth grade he’d stolen her lunch, and when she’d accused him of it, he’d given her some back talk, and she’d never forgiven him, although it was hard to imagine Willard giving anybody any back talk, he was so pleasant and gentle. He wore eyeglasses, a cheap pair of wire-rimmed mail-order specs, and he seemed to be hiding behind them. He was tall for his age, fifteen, and so scrawny it was pitiful, although he was a great first baseman on our ball team. I sometimes thought that Abe Lincoln must have looked like Willard when he was that age and doing his reading around the fireplace. Willard didn’t have a fireplace, just an old stove to read by, if he read, and I suspected he did. I suspected Willard was the smartest feller in school, smarter
even than me. Latha Bourne told me once that Willard probably had been named after an old traveling salesman who’d come to Stay More perennially since the days it had first been founded, but had died here before I was born. Eli Willard was his name, and he was from Connecticut, and while I know little about his personality, I picture him as resembling another native of Connecticut (who wound up in Sleepy Hollow, New York), named Ichabod Crane: “He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.” Those words pretty well summed up the image of Willard Dinsmore as well as his namesake.
Altogether, we had a poorer turnout at that meeting than we’d have the following afternoon at our weekly ball game between the Axis and the Allies. There weren’t enough from either side to constitute the nine needed for a ball team. The three Allied thugs who months later would thrash me sauntered together through the schoolhouse door as if they were three Western outlaws entering a saloon in search of mischief. Each of them was carrying a copy of Mare’s poster that they’d ripped down, perhaps as a gesture of defiance, although it made it look as if they were each too stupid to remember what they were doing without the poster. Behind them came two of their girlfriends, and three other members of the Allies, but the Axis still outnumbered them by one, or two if you counted Miss Jerram, who was sort of an honorary Axis since she was leader of the Axis knitters.
From force of habit, each of us sat at the same school desk we’d ordinarily occupy during the school day, Allies on one side, Axis on the other, even though this was summertime and we hadn’t sat in those seats for many weeks. This prompted Miss Jerram to stand up and say, “Well, boys and girls, we may as well get started. Since this here is my schoolhouse, don’t ye reckon I ought to be in charge of this meetin?”
“Nome,” said Willard. “Mare’s the mare. It’s his gubberment, and he orter be in charge.”
“Willard Dinsmore, nobody gave you permission to speak,” Miss Jerram said, pouting. “And you, Dawny, take off that slingshot.” She pointed at my customary summertime necklace, a slingshot made from strips of an old inner tube and a fork of bow wood, without which I was never seen in the summer. Such a weapon was not allowed in school.
“This aint school,” I pointed out, setting the tone for the proceedings. “This is a town meeting.”
“All right,” she relented. “Gerald, this meeting was your idee, so you mought as well take charge of it. But you’d just better lead the Pledge of Allegiance anyhow.” She motioned for him to stand, but she did not sit down herself, not even after the Pledge of Allegiance.
Mare the mayor-to-be rose humbly, stooping his shoulders more than was necessary, and even blushing a little. He put his hand over his heart, so we all stood and put our hands over ours, and we faced the flag, furled on its pole and collecting dust in the corner. None of us tried to improve upon the version we’d first recited in the first grade: “Apple legions to deaf leg often knighted states of a merry can to the wee public for witches hands, one Asian in the vestibule with little tea and just rice for all.”
Then Mare rubbed his hands together as if to rinse the sweat from them. He coughed. He looked at us apologetically, as if he’d made a big mistake dragging us out here on Friday night. Then he cleared his throat noisily and said to Willard, “I aint the mare yet, ye know.” Then he glanced at Sog Alan and said, “First just let me say I’m mighty glad that you Allies was good enough to join us.”
“We aint jined ye yet, Mare,” Sog Alan said. “We’uns turned up, but we aint jined ye.”
“I’m just glad you’re here,” Mare said. “No sense in us being always at each other’s throats. The main purpose of this here meetin is to bring harmony to Stay More.”
“‘Harmony!?’” Larry Duckworth snickered, as if he’d never heard the word in his life, and he probably hadn’t.
“It means we need to agree with each other more often,” I pedantically defined the word for the poor fool.
“That’ll be the day!” Jim John Whitter declared. “The Allies won’t never agree with the Axis!”
“Boys, boys!” Miss Jerram said. “If you’uns aim to fight, I won’t be a party to this. I’ll march right out of here!”
We waited for her to march right out of there, but she didn’t. Maybe it was just as well. At that moment we could have demolished the Allies in a fair fight, outnumbered as they were.
“We don’t have to always agree,” Mare declared, and glanced at me as if to refute what I’d said. “Matter of fact, to be a government we’ve got to have opposing parties, like the Democrats and the Republicans, and we’ll keep each other on our toes by not agreeing. It’s called ‘checks and balances.’”
“Fair deal,” said Sog, “so what if I was to run for mare myself?”
“Fine and dandy,” said Mare. “That’s your right and your privilege, in a democracy.”
“Just what in heck is a mare anyhow?” Larry Duckworth wanted to know. “I never heared of ary such a bird till you started in to callin yourself one. What town do you know has got a mare? Has Jasper got one?”
As far as anyone knew, our county seat did not have a mayor. There was a county judge, which was an administrative position, not a judicial one, and the judge was in charge of everything.
“Most sizable towns has got mares,” Mare said. “Aint that right, Miss Jerram?”
“That’s what I’ve been told,” she declared. “But I never saw a mare myself.”
“So what does a mare git to do?” Sog wanted to know. “If I win the ’lection, can I boss folks around?”
“Sog, you boss ’em around anyway,” Willard Dinsmore observed. “But don’t worry none ’bout winnin the ’lection, because you aint got a dog’s chance.”
“What d’ye want to bet?” Sog challenged him.
“A mare,” said Mare, who ought to know, “is supposed to be the principal officer of the town, in charge of good works, and fixin what’s broke, and also he does ceremonies like presentin a ‘key to the city’ to important visitors.”
All of us stared at Mare as we contemplated these strange images. Ella Jean, my sweet, was the first to speak. “When’s the last time we had a important visitor?”
There was no answer, for not even Miss Jerram, who’d lived here for some years longer than anyone else, could remember any important visitors.
“Heck,” Mare protested, “I don’t have to give nobody no keys. It’s just sort of honorary anyhow.”
There followed a halfhearted discussion of just what a government might accomplish for Stay More. A few suggestions for civic improvement were proposed, but any idea the Axis offered was disputed by the Allies, and vice versa. One of the Allies submitted that the town could look a little better if we tore down the old gristmill, unused for many years but still towering above the town with its four-story bulk clad in rusty-red tin that had once been meant to imitate brick but never succeeded. But Willard said truthfully, “That’d leave a mighty big hole in the sky,” and naturally we Axis were protective of the building because it was part of our defended territory, the village. According to history or legend, Jesse James had once robbed that mill, and the Axis argued that it ought to be left standing just as a monument to the great outlaw.
I raised my hand and intimated that in the interests of beautification, how about painting some of the buildings? Both general stores and all of the houses (except the hermit Dan’s yellow house) were without paint, their natural wood a kind of dusty tan, and while I would grow up to realize that that color was absolutely appropriate for the rustic setting of the village, it seemed to me at that time, when my civic zeal was coming on, that we could use some white paint on some of them. We could apply the paint ourselves, if need be.
“Who’s gonna buy the paint, Ernie?” one of the Allies wanted to know, and another one said, “I aint never used a brush in my life and I aint about to start i
n to learnin how.”
Mare said, “I don’t reckon we want to change the town none. But if only there was something we could do to keep the town from gittin smaller and smaller. The way it’s shrinkin, there won’t be nothin left of it by and by.” He said these words mournfully, and, I have to admit, prophetically.
One of the Allied hussies, Betty June Alan, said to Mare, “Silly, the reason it’s gittin smaller is Uncle Sam keeps on takin all the menfolks Overseas!”
She had a point, although Stay More’s population had been declining long before the war broke out, and the Depression more than the war had probably cost us numbers of our people, lost to the California emigration.
“Yeah, Mare,” Betty June’s big brother Sog put in, “Just what d’ye aim to do to stop the war and bring all them daddies back home?” It was a rhetorical question, although I was tempted to throw the question back at Sog, if he was also going to be a candidate for mayor. When Mare could not answer the question, Sog said to him, “Aint it about time you went Over There yourself and did your part?”
“Any day now,” Mare acknowledged, mindful of his draft status. “But while I’m waitin to be called up, there’s a lot to be done to help this town.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 78